“Exactly,” said Mother Northwind. “But there are some things by rights you shouldn’t know that you must know. So: Brenna ran away from home, but I have located her and she is being brought to the city. And Prince Karl, shortly after you were arrested, was… kidnapped by the Common Cause.”
Verdsmitt shot her a look, an exaggerated “take” that on stage would almost certainly have gotten a laugh. It elicited a chuckle even from Mother Northwind. “A surprise to us all, I’m sure. But not to worry. I know where he is, and he’s safe… he’s at Goodwife Beth’s.”
Verdsmitt snorted. “Depends on what you mean by ‘safe.’ ”
“Anyway, he’s out of the city. No one but the members of Vinthor’s cell know where… and they’re all at Beth’s as well. There is no one to betray him in New Cabora, no matter what… incentives… Falk may provide.”
“That is one of the things I should not know, and so I can say nothing of it to Falk,” Verdsmitt said softly, “but I know what he has done to my city. He has brought to it what the MageLords always, sooner or later, bring to the lives of Commoners: wreck, ruin, and destruction.” He lowered his voice, even though he knew no one could hear. “Give me leave to kill him, too, Patron.”
This time Mother Northwind did not rebuke him for using that title. Instead she studied him thoughtfully. “You are remarkably bloodthirsty for a playwright,” she said. “And remarkably set against the MageLords for one who is, after all, one of them.”
“I haven’t considered myself a MageLord since I was sixteen years old,” Verdsmitt snarled. “As you well know.”
He instantly regretted losing his temper. As a man who had led a double life for a very long time, and as a professional actor, he prided himself on being able to school his emotions. But he hated to be reminded of the accident of birth that had made him MageLord, even though without it he would not have the unique skills that made him so valuable to Mother Northwind’s plan now.
And she, of all people, knew that.
He clearly remembered the rainy night, more than two decades gone, when she had presented herself at his door in the slightly shabby-but-still-respectable neighborhood of New Cabora where he had lived at that time. He hadn’t been Davydd Verdsmitt, famous playwright, then, but Davydd Verdsmitt, barely-making-ends-meetby- sweeping-floors playwright.
His first play was just then about to take the boards at the Paragon, whose name was a better joke than anything he’d written. A bat-infested old firetrap that mostly staged ancient farces-interspersed with equally ancient strippers-it had had the undeniable attraction of being cheap to rent.
He’d been so young then. Only half a dozen years had passed since he had so violently removed himself from the ranks of the MageLords, “drowning” in a tragic boating accident on the Great Lake, body never recovered. Not that he supposed his father, Lord Athol, now Prime Adviser to the King, had looked very hard. After all, a few days before he had all but suggested to his son that he quietly commit suicide.
Mother Northwind must have been younger then, too, but in his memory she looked the same as she did now, leaning on her stick, standing in the rain. “Aren’t you going to ask an old woman in?” she’d said.
And then she had offered him her grand bargain.
Before he could even ask her who she was or where she came from, she said, “I know about you and Kravon.”
He had physically started. “How-?” And then, belatedly, had attempted to recover. “The King? I’m a Commoner. What is there to know about me and the King?”
“Let us dispense with these games right now,” Mother Northwind had said. “You cannot deny anything to me, you cannot hide anything; I know everything you and Kravon did together. I know what your feelings for him were, and his for you. And I know how much it devastated you when he renounced you, renounced the love you thought he felt for you, and revealed and reviled you as a homosexual.”
Verdsmitt remembered how the blood had drained away from his face and head, making him so dizzy he’d had to collapse into the nearest chair to keep from falling to his knees. “That’s-”
“I don’t care in the slightest that you prefer your own sex,” Mother Northwind said. “If it would amuse you, sometime, I will tell you just how many of the MageLords who shunned and laughed at you after King Kravon made the truth known are also bedding boys-and each other-in the privacy of their own estates, usually with their poor wives none the wiser.” A flicker of anger had touched her face, quickly smoothed away. “But you have something I need, Davydd Verdsmitt: magical ability of a kind that comes just once a century, if that.”
He couldn’t deny being a MageLord; why deny that? “Much good it has done me.”
“Your skill as an enchanter, while you were still a boy, awed your tutors,” Mother Northwind said. “It was so great, so extraordinary, that had you not chosen so precipitously to drown in the Great Lake, the scandal would soon have been forgotten, papered over as such things are for MageLords.” She shook her head. “Well, it is too late for you to return to your father’s estate…”
“I would die first,” Verdsmitt growled. “My father threw me out, told me to-”
“I know,” Mother Northwind said, though again, she didn’t say how . “But listen to me, Davydd Verdsmitt. It is not too late for you to take revenge.”
He had stared blankly at her. “Revenge?”
“On your father. On all the MageLords who laughed at you, scorned you, made you an object of ridicule in taverns and manor halls around the kingdom.” She poked at him with a bony finger. “But especially.. . revenge on King Kravon.”
And then she had explained something of her plan, her grand scheme to grow a Magebane-Verdsmitt still found it hard to believe such a thing even existed, much less could be created, like a play or a piece of pottery-and with him bring down the entire rotten edifice of Evrenfels… a scheme that required only one thing: a way to kill the King at the precise moment he needed to die.
“An ordinary mage couldn’t do it,” Mother Northwind said. “The magical defenses woven around the King are too strong. I could do it, were I in physical contact with him… but I must be elsewhere when the deed is done. A simple physical attack such as Commoners might launch would be thwarted by the same defenses that protect him from a magical one. But an enchanted device, so subtly made, so carefully constructed that it leaks nothing of its magical nature to those searching for such things, one that looks like an ordinary, unthreatening object, something the King might even carry on his person, something that can be triggered at just the right time… such a device could do the trick. But to create it would take the greatest enchanter the Kingdom has ever known.” She cocked her head, eyes on his, and said softly, “You.”
The appeal to his pride had helped to lure him in. The chance to take revenge on the MageLords, and on the man he had once loved but now hated with even more passion, might have been enough for him to agree. But what had really sealed the deal was the final offer from Mother Northwind: if he agreed to help her, she would fill the Paragon with paying patrons for a week.
“A week is all I can give you,” she said. “I have contacts enough to arrange for that. After that… your play must stand on its own merits.”
“It will,” Verdsmitt had said fiercely. “It will. Give me an audience, Mother Northwind, and I will do the rest…” He’d stood and held out his hand to her. “ All of the rest.”
She’d smiled, and taken his hand. She’d held it for a long moment, squeezed it hard to support him as a brief bout of dizziness made his knees inexplicably sag. “I am confident of it, my boy,” she’d said, and as the dizziness passed, she’d disappeared once more into the wet night.
Since then he had never wavered, never doubted that what he and Mother Northwind planned had to be done… and never let dim or waver the bright flame of his hatred of his one-time friend and lover Kravon, now King.
Which was why, he told himself, he had reacted with anger to Mother Northwind’s naming of him as a MageLord. So he had been, but so he was no longer. And if their plan succeeded, as they both hoped, soon there would be no MageLords or Mageborn: all would be equal, all would have to face the vagaries of the world without magic and the arrogance it bred.
“Sorry, Davydd,” Mother Northwind said now. “I cannot help baiting people. It is a bad habit and will land me in trouble someday, I fear.”
Verdsmitt snorted. “As opposed to plotting to murder the King, tear down the Great Barrier, and destroy magic forever?”
“I suppose there is some possibility that that will land me trouble, as well,” Mother Northwind said serenely.
